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HBO's decision to schedule the five-part "Parade's End" shortly after the end of the most recent season of PBS' "Downton Abbey" is either very, very smart, or just foolhardy.

Sure, viewers needing another fix of early-20th-century Britain may flock to Part 1 of the miniseries Tuesday. But the question is, will they stick around after they realize it requires more work than following the comparatively simple ups and downs of life at Downton?

They should - not just because the HBO miniseries sports an enviable pedigree - adaptation by playwright Tom Stoppard, with Benedict Cumberbatch ("Sherlock") and Rebecca Hall ("The Town") in leading roles - but because "Parade's End" has ample emotional and intellectual rewards for any viewer who sticks with it.

"Parade's End," based on four linked novels by the often-overlooked British author Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), is set in the years before and during World War I.

Like "Downton," it homes in on the cultural shifts taking place in England during the Edwardian Era, the national post-Victorian unbinding of mores and morals that was only hastened by the Great War.

It was apt for Julian Fellowes to use the upstairs/downstairs structure as a metaphor for what was happening through the rest of England in "Downton," but Stoppard is more interested in the psychological makeup of "Parade's" characters: What is it that prevents them from taking curative action in their lives and what is it about change that so terrifies people that we take refuge in stasis?

From the outset, know that these are not warmly inviting characters. In fact, if you're looking for characters you "like," stick to "Downton" or go on Facebook.

Christopher Tietjens (Cumberbatch), one of two sons of a noble family, is married to the flamboyantly unfaithful Sylvia Satterthwaite (Hall) and is personally reserved and emotionally taciturn.

He has bottled up his emotions so tightly that even when presented with opportunities to express them in ways that could change his life for the better, he cannot find the words.

In a sense, he has enslaved himself to reticence and propriety, and despite the fact that the world is rapidly changing around him, he cannot find a way out of himself.

On the face of it, Sylvia would seem his polar opposite, a flashy, highly sexual and spoiled egoist adept at manipulating others, especially men. She is a devout Catholic, which prevents her from divorcing her husband after their marriage inevitably cools to a barely cordial arrangement.

However, her faith isn't quite strong enough to keep her from being unfaithful, but that is just one of the many intriguing contradictions in her character that only heighten our interest in her.

It isn't obvious at first, but eventually we come to see that, like her husband, she is trapped, not by old-school propriety, but by her own manipulative ambition.

The Great War itself figures heavily in the plot of the miniseries, but, with one significant exception, largely as a cultural and emotional lever. At heart, "Parade's End" is a story about a love triangle complicated by withheld love.

The third point of the triangle is young suffragette and pacifist Valentine Wannop (Adelaide Clemens, "The Great Gatsby"). In every way, she is Sylvia's opposite. Where Mrs. Tietjens favors elaborate gowns and dramatic hairstyles, Valentine is always in virginal white, her hair trimmed to boyish efficiency.

The embodiment of all that is becoming new and youthful in the young century, Valentine is neither manipulative nor taciturn: She consistently says what she feels, what she believes and what she wants.

Almost.

She wants Christopher, even if he is married. But her forthrightness notwithstanding, she finds it difficult to express her feelings for him because he cannot let his guard down enough for her to do so. At one point, she summons up the courage, only to find he's left the room.

Stoppard and Ford shift the setting from the drawing rooms and halls of power in London to the trenches in France when Christopher goes to the front, and we get an almost satirical look at the bureaucracy of war.

Christopher can't get fire extinguishers for the Canadian troops and is then upbraided by his superiors for failing to supply fire extinguishers for "the colonial conscripts," as one of his colleagues calls them.

The extended, "Catch-22"-like battlefield scenes are brilliant in and of themselves, but they also provide the final kick in the butt that Christopher needs to break his bonds of tradition, Toryism and emotional reticence. Playing by the rules, he finally realizes, makes no sense if the rules are pointless.

"Parade's End" also is blessed with a rich array of secondary characters, many of whom are delightfully post-Dickensian, such as the mad Rev. Duchemin (Rufus Sewell, "Pillars of the Earth"), who harbors a religious belief that women's undergarments are too confining.

His ever-trembling wife, Edith (Anne-Marie Duff), is always terrified he will say or do something inappropriate in front of others, especially church elders.

Susanna White ("Bleak House") directs with a sure and patient hand and a vision clearly in sync with Stoppard's magnificent screenplay. Those who have seen Stoppard's stage work - "The Real Thing," "Coast of Utopia," among others - know his singular gift for revelatory language.